Simulating the Impact of Qoe on Per-‐Service Group Hsd Bandwidth
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SIMULATING THE IMPACT OF QOE ON PER-SERVICE GROUP HSD BANDWIDTH CAPACITY REQUIREMENTS TOM CLOONAN, CTO, NETWORK SOLUTIONS JIM ALLEN, LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER, BROADBAND GROUP MIKE EMMENDORFER, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE AND STRATEGY, OFFICE OF THE CTO TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO TRAFFIC ENGINEERING ................................................... 3 QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE BASICS .................................................................... 7 THE NEW TRAFFIC ENGINEERING FORMULA ................................................. 9 VALIDATING THE NEW TRAFFIC ENGINEERING FORMULA ........................... 14 TWO OBSERVED WEAKNESSES OF THE NEW TRAFFIC ENGINEERING FORMULA ..................................................................................................... 39 SELECTING APPROPRIATE TMAX & BHPG VALUES GIVEN AN ADVERTISED BILLBOARD BANDWIDTH .............................................................................. 41 TYPICAL DESIGN SCENARIO .......................................................................... 44 CONCLUSIONS .............................................................................................. 46 RELATED READINGS ...................................................................................... 46 REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 46 ABBREVIATIONS & ACRONYMS .................................................................... 48 Copyright 2014 – ARRIS Enterprises, Inc. All rights Reserved. 2 INTRODUCTION TO TRAFFIC ENGINEERING “How much bandwidth capacity is needed to keep the subscribers in our service groups happy?” That question has been asked by Multiple System Operators (MSOs) throughout the years of High-Speed Data (HSD) deployments, and traffic engineers have developed many tools to help answer the question. Different MSOs have employed different traffic engineering algorithms and used different traffic engineering models throughout the years. This paper will propose and study a new traffic engineering algorithm that may be useful as MSOs move forward into the future. A service group is an important concept within traffic engineering. In this paper, it will be loosely defined as a group of subscribers who share common bandwidth resources. In the Cable Industry, a service group is oftentimes comprised of the subscribers connected to a single fiber node or the subscribers connected to a group of fiber nodes. As traffic engineers of the past created their important estimates of required bandwidth capacity for a High-Speed Data (HSD) service group, they usually paid attention to four important parameters: • the Maximum Sustained Traffic Rate (Tmax) levels offered to the subscribers • the Advertised Billboard Bandwidth levels • the Busy-Hour Performance Goal • the Average Per-Subscriber Traffic (Tavg) level consumed by subscribers The “Maximum Sustained Traffic Rate” (Tmax) level is the maximum bandwidth permitted for a particular subscriber service flow within a DOCSIS system. Tmax is a maximum bandwidth level that is managed by the traffic scheduling algorithms within the Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTSs). This Tmax value is closely associated with the MSO’s “Advertised Billboard Bandwidth” (ABB) value, which is the bandwidth level that is advertised by MSO marketing teams as the maximum bandwidth that a subscriber may be likely to observe when they subscribe to a particular Service Level Agreement (SLA) level. The “Busy-Hour Performance Goal” (BHPG) value is the bandwidth level that the MSO traffic engineer attempts to guarantee to any subscriber performing a Performance monitoring test during the busy-hour period. This BHPG value is a Quality of Experience goal or Quality of Experience (QoE) threshold that the MSO attempts to reach. Whether they reach that goal or not is determined by many factors, including the amount of bandwidth capacity provided to a particular service group, the number of subscribers Copyright 2014 – ARRIS Enterprises, Inc. All rights Reserved. 3 sharing the bandwidth capacity in the service group, the activity levels of those subscribers. There is oftentimes a close association between a subscriber’s Tmax value and the subscriber’s Advertised Billboard Bandwidth (ABB) value. The ratio of the Tmax value to the Advertised Billboard Bandwidth value is an important quantity that must be determined by every MSO when they begin deploying DOCSIS HSD services. Within this paper, we will call this ratio the “Cushion Ratio” (Rc), where: Rc = Tmax/(Advertised Billboard Bandwidth) (1) Throughout much of this paper, we will assume that the Tmax value is usually set by the MSO to be ~20% higher than the Advertised Billboard Bandwidth value. This leads to a Cushion Ratio of Rc = 1.2. However, MSOs are known to use other Cushion Ratios of Rc = 1.1 or Rc = 1.0. Cushion Ratios of 1.0 are not typically recommended. The use of Cushion Ratios which are greater than 1.0 are highly recommended by the authors, because it will be shown this will often decrease system costs. There is oftentimes a close association between a subscriber’s Advertised Billboard Bandwidth (ABB) value and the MSO’s Busy-Hour Performance Goal (BHPG) value. The ratio of Busy-Hour Performance Goal to Advertised Billboard Bandwidth is an interesting value that we will call the “Benevolence Ratio” (Rb), where: Rb = (Busy-Hour Performance Goal)/(Advertised Billboard Bandwidth) (1) MSOs can choose to set the Busy-Hour Performance Goal value to be equal to the Advertised Billboard Bandwidth value (Rb = 1.0). In this case, they are instructing their traffic engineers to make an attempt at ensuring that subscribers will experience Performance monitor scores that match their Advertised Billboard Bandwidth levels at all times- even during the congested busy-hour periods of time. However, it will result in higher costs to provide the extra bandwidth capacity within the network design. To save money, MSOs can also take a different approach by setting Rb < 1.0, whereby they provide a service that offers Performance monitor scores that match the Advertised Billboard Bandwidth levels only during periods of low congestion, but that do not match Advertised Billboard Bandwidth levels during periods of high congestion. For simplicity, within most of the rest of this paper, we will assume that the MSO is setting Rb = 1.0. Since MSOs typically offer more than one SLA level to their subscriber base, there is a different Tmax value associated with each SLA level. The highest SLA level offers the highest Advertised Billboard Bandwidth value and the highest Tmax value. We will refer Copyright 2014 – ARRIS Enterprises, Inc. All rights Reserved. 4 to this highest of all Tmax values as the Tmax_max value within this paper. The Advertised Billboard Bandwidth corresponding to that highest Tmax value is typically the highest Advertised Billboard Bandwidth value. We will refer to this as the ABB_max value. The Busy-Hour Performance Goal corresponding to that highest ABB value is typically the highest Busy-Hour Performance Goal value- we will refer to this as the BHPG_max value. To illustrate this concept, consider a hypothetical MSO who offers three Service Level Agreement levels (Bronze, Silver, and Gold). Assume that these Service Level Agreement levels are defined as shown below: • Bronze SLA o Advertised Billboard BW = 50 Mbps o Tmax = 60 Mbps (Rc = 1.2) o Busy-Hour Performance Goal = 50 Mbps (Rb = 1.0) • Silver SLA o Advertised Billboard BW = 100 Mbps o Tmax = 120 Mbps (Rc = 1.2) o Busy-Hour Performance Goal = 100 Mbps (Rb = 1.0) • Gold SLA o Advertised Billboard BW = 165 Mbps o Tmax = 200 Mbps (Rc = 1.2) o Busy-Hour Performance Goal =165 Mbps (Rb = 1.0) For this hypothetical MSO, the Tmax_max value would be given by 200 Mbps. Its associated maximum Advertised Billboard Bandwidth (ABB_max) would be given by 200 Mbps/1.2 = ~165 Mbps. Its associated maximum Busy-Hour Performance Goal (BHPG_max) would also be given by ~165 Mbps. This 165 Mbps value would be the target value that the MSO should endeavor to provide to their Gold-level subscribers whenever those subscribers are trying to perform large-scale TCP file transfers or performance monitoring tests in the busy-hour. Since the MSO’s DOCSIS network is designed and sized to be shared by many transient users, statistics are used by traffic engineers to determine exactly the right amount of bandwidth capacity required within a service group to support the traffic of the many subscribers. These statistical analyses make assumptions about the likely levels of concurrency (simultaneous activity) between the many subscribers. However, there is always the possibility that the actual concurrency levels might be greater than the assumed concurrency levels, and when that happens, congestion is likely to result and it may lead to performance levels that are lower than this Advertised Billboard Bandwidth. The Average Per-Subscriber Traffic Rate (Tavg) level is not a CMTS configuration setting (like Tmax) or a marketing value (like ABB) or a QoE goal (like BHPG). Instead, it is the actual bandwidth consumed by subscribers. Within this paper, we will define it to be the Copyright 2014 – ARRIS Enterprises, Inc. All rights Reserved. 5 average amount of bandwidth consumed by a single subscriber during busy-hour operation. It can be measured by an MSO using the following technique: 1) Identify a typical service group. Ideally, this measurement should be done on an uncongested service